The judge, the commissioners of minors and the “batters” (Recife - 1960s-1970s)

Abstract

Looking into the collection of the periodical Dário de Pernambuco, we found a series of reports on the daily lives of boys and girls in situations of poverty, abandonment or in conflict with the law. Among the articles, it was found the report that reported the performance of the juvenile judge of Recife, Nelson Ribeiro, entitled Recovering minors is the motto of the Judiciary. From the analysis of the discourse of this matter, intersecting it with other documentary sources, the objective of this text is to problematize how the forms of social control over children and adolescents in a situation of abandonment were produced, in the period marked by the implementation of the National Policy for Welfare of Minors, which came into effect months after
the civil-military coup in 1964. In this argumentative process, the role of commissioners for minors and the discursive production on the “child issue” will be discussed, based on the argument that the juvenile court sought to act on the basis of police logic. In this way, we seek to analyze how a governmentality was built on the historically produced social problem, in the period in focus, when the “child issue” came to be conceived as a “national security issue”.